Deployment Solution

Hi we are having some problems deploying our windows 7 image. The image was capturedwith  prepare to image task and capture image task so the altiris agent is installed in the image. We then have a deploy task that deploys the image, reboots to production, runs a few script and apply's system configuration to join the domain. It all works when we deploy it on a single virtual machine.

The problem starts when we try to run the deploy tasks on multiple laptops, they all get the same name and guid and just stops to run the scripts and apply system configuration tasks after the image is deployed. How do you guys go around this problem? What are Symantec recommended way to do this?

/A
 

This is what Symantec recommands to recover the situation.

One personal note on this: don't bother wit the /ResetGuid from the Altiris Agent and go with a client side generated Guid [1][2] which ensures the agent will be back in working order as soon as it executes the policy.

[1] https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/duplicate-guid-computer-id-ns6#comment-4537561

[2] https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/change-altiris-computer-guid#comment-3209461

Frankly, this souncs like "prepare for image capture" was skipped.  Is it possible you ran sysprep manually?  If you run sysprep manually, then we don't have a chance to strip the GUID from the agent along with a few other things.  It is possible to run Sysprep manually, but we don't recommend it for the exact reason you mentioned above.

Please note that, though there are weaknesses currently with the "prepare for image capture" task, it's still better than a manual run of Sysprep.  The only time I'd recommend a manual run of Sysprep is if you also do NOT include the agent in the image.  If you do this, we have a method of injecting the agent into the image (which involves really just putting the agent installer "stub" into the image and letting it do it's thing after the image comes up).  This would be the recommendation if you need to do some cool things with Sysprep manually and don't want to use our process.

Please verify that you actually ran that step prior to image capture, because that's what it sounds like you did not do.

Oh, and another possibility: please verify that you do not have an actual name in the sysprep file (rather than a random name or something like that) which might force all systems to come up with the same name and thus confuse the crud out of AD as well as NS.  This can be checked by looking to see if you have a custom unattend.xml file and looking at it.  Ours does the random thing.

I wonder if the "prepare" for imaging, was correctly integrating the "Altiris GUID reset" ? Perhaps I do a useless "AexAgentUtile.exe /resetguid ?